Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy

Author/Contributor(s):	Gaines, Alisha
Publisher:	University of North Carolina Press
Date:	05/08/2017
Binding:	Paperback
Condition:	NEW

"In 1948, journalist Ray Sprigle traded his whiteness to live as a black man for four weeks. A little over a decade later, John Howard Griffin famously 'became' black as well, traveling the American South in search of a certain kind of racial understanding. Contemporary history is littered with the surprisingly complex stories of white people passing as black, and here Alisha Gaines constructs a unique genealogy of 'empathetic racial impersonation' - white liberals walking in the fantasy of black skin under the alibi of cross-racial empathy. At the end of their experiments in 'blackness,' Gaines argues that these debatably well-meaning white impersonators arrived at little more than false consciousness"